Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 05/01/2019

Why Apple Stock Went Up – How The US Lost The Cellular Data Industry – Amazon Burning Books

Craig Peterson  0:00
Hey, good morning Craig Peterson here. We had a bit of fun this morning with Ken and Matt, talked about a digital book burning spree that’s going on right now a little bit more about that Tesla v Mercedes. And we also talked about Apple, I went into a little bit of background about why Apple stock went up this week, and how we the United States fell behind when it comes to cellular modems for our devices. Anyhow, all of that and more and I’m not gonna be able to do my, my weekly It’s a Security Thing this week podcast, I am going to be on the road heading to Kentucky for the derby. It should be a fun week. Anyways. Take care, everybody, and we’ll be back with our hopefully our regular show on Saturday. I’m planning on trying to get that done too. Take care. Bye bye.

Matt Gagnon 0:55
Red Hot Chili Peppers playing in the background for some reason.  Craig Peterson our tech guru. Craig, nice to have you back with us once again, sir. How are you?

Craig 1:07
Hey, good morning. What’s today’s magic word? I missed it earlier.

Matt 1:12 
The word of the day is…

Ken Altshuler 1:13
Apple stock. Apple stock went up 5%.

Matt 1:19   
That is actually two words. 

Craig 1:22
And Google went down too. 

Ken 1:26  
But we have Facebook, but Facebook is… but he cares about our privacy Craig.

Craig 1:30
Well, yeah. Facebook is going to be the most valuable company in the world. I’m sure. Right. I heard you guys talking about it a little bit earlier this morning. Because there are some huge issues going on right now with our friends over at Facebook. In fact, he’s facing, I don’t know if you read this one or not. But probably what’s going to be the largest fine in history.

Matt 1:57
Yeah. It’s really big.

Craig 1:58
Did you hear that? It could be like 2 billion or something. 

Ken 2:02
But they’ve saved up.

Matt 2:03
But they’ve been saving for it.

Ken 2:04 
They’ve been saving for a couple of weeks.

Craig 2:09
Yeah. Well, as usual, there’s more stuff in the news about Facebook in the fact that they just aren’t as ethical as you might think they were. And you guys were talking about the twins earlier. Right? Did  I hear that. Yes. It was Matt brought it up. Yeah.

Matt 2:29
The Vigelvas twins.

Ken 2:30 
Vigelvas.

Matt 2:31
Which, by the way, we’re in fact played by the same dude. They were.

Craig 2:33
That’s tricky, tricky.

Matt 2:35 
One guy playing two roles.

Craig 2:36
And it makes me wonder, you know, if, if you’re an ethical person, how do you as a business person, survive against somebody like this Zuckerberg and all of the allegations against him? You know, look at what happened back at Harvard, when he was you know, putting the software together. And apparently there’s a guy that was hired to write some code by these brothers, these twins and then basically stole it and ran with it and, and lied and signed an agreement with federal regulators that he wouldn’t be doing all of these shenanigans with people’s private information. And yet he did. And now there’s more emails that come out showing that indeed, he was just totally making it up. That he had been, in fact still sharing that information, still selling and still negotiating. We got emails now that just came out last week about it. But yeah, th e question is, how much privacy do people really want and expect? I don’t know. What do you guys think?

Matt 3:42 
Not very much. I am of the opinion Craig and I think you share it, that people talk a big game about caring about it, and then actually don’t care about it, that they really all I really want privacy. And I am outraged. I’m outraged. I don’t have any as they hand over their social security number and credit basically the next person to ask them, so yeah.

Craig 4:02
Yeah, no, yeah, yeah, they do do that. The numbers are down, the visitors to the site are down. But I’m not so sure that it’s it’s really much of it has to do with people being concerned about the privacy, I really think it’s that there are more competitors out there now.

Matt 4:20
I actually I didn’t quit Facebook, but I deleted the app on my phone because I can’t take it anymore. And it has nothing to do with privacy. I’m just sick of it. I just can’t stand it. So that’s why I think it’s down right as I think people are making like actual consumer choices about the products not not so much whether or not their information is being stolen. Because I think everybody thinks their information’s being stolen anyway. And I think they’ve already made their peace with that.

Craig 4:42
Well, you know, Matt, strangely enough, I think we’re on the same page there.

Matt 4:45 
Indeed. 

Craig 4:46 
It never happened.

Matt 4:47
No, not at all.

Ken 4:50
So did your Apple stock went up, by the way.

Craig 4:53
Yeah, I heard about that. I don’t know if you guys heard a little bit of behind the scenes stuff. What happened with Qualcomm and Intel. But Apple, you know, you guys know Apple really doesn’t make a lot of the components that go into the iPhone. In fact, a lot of them, of course, are made in China. But they did Apple does design the main chips, and they’re the main processors. And there’s rumors, by the way that Apple because their processors that are being used in the bigger iPads are faster than comparable Intel chips with a with a lower power consumption, that Apple’s talking about maybe using those chips for the next generations of Mac box, which would really be kind of cool. But the whole Qualcomm thing is, Apple does not make or design the chips that tie our iPhones and other devices into the cellular data networks. And with 5G coming down the road quickly add us, in fact, it will be rolled out this year in some of the major cities. And I’m sure Portland is right on the top of it.

Matt 6:00 
Of course. Of course it is.

Craig 6:01 
But I think it’s like New York and a couple of others. But because of that there are a lot of changes that are going to have to go into the iPhones radio technology. And therefore Apple’s been trying to figure out what’s going on. And there’s this big lawsuit with Qualcomm and Apple and Ken, that’s a lot of the reason why the Apple stock price went up, that all got settled. But apparently there had been talks in place with Apple and Intel, for Apple to buy Intel’s chip business that made those radio chips those with chips that cover the WiFi, cover the cellular connections. And so when Apple finally said okay, Qualcomm,we’re dropping the suits. They are all gone now with Qualcomm and Apple, and the Intel, the Intel business is dead. Intel, basically shot it in the head, they’re no longer to make chips for cell phones, which really, Qualcomm is kind of the only real game in town. And there’s some interesting stuff that’s coming, I saw an analysis it came out this is from the UK, talking about how the United States has fallen badly behind in some of these chip designs, particularly dealing with cell phones and other technology, while way is huge in that business. And of course, we don’t like to deal with them. And we had more stuff come up this week about Huawei, and back doors and some of the cyber things where they were spying on more people that just came up this week. And Qualcomm so the US just can’t compete anymore. And it’s a shame to see Intel dropping that business. Because I think it’s critical here to the US and, and our infrastructure. It looks like the whole 5G business, really, that we’re talking about the hardware here now really is going to go to China is going to be going to US companies, and that’s a shame. And normally for our economy to keep growing, we have to have innovation. And because of decisions that were really made back in the 90s, some government regulations that went in place, and business responses to those regulations, we basically conceded that whole business and I don’t know that we’ll ever get that particular business back.

Matt 8:21
We’re talking to Craig Peterson our tech guru. He joins us now as he always does on Wednesdays at this time to go over the world of technology. Now Craig I may or may not buy a Tesla vehicle at some point. And if I do, it’ll be to save the planet, because that’s the kind of thing that I would do, right? But you get in all seriousness you do buy it usually, because you’d like to, you know, maybe you have your carbon footprint go down and whatnot. But perhaps just because this Tesla car is so clean and whatnot after produced, you might not be considering what it takes to actually build it in the first place. What is your actual carbon footprint if you buy one of these cars?

Craig 8:57
Yeah, this is a huge thing. You probably remember few years back they did a survey of people who owned Priuses. Toyota Prius is which are these some of these initial cars that were hybrids, and it really nice little cars, cool, cool technology. But do you realize over 70% of the respondents, the number one answer was they bought the Prius because of what they thought other people would think of them for buying a Prius. So basically Matt, it ties into what you’re really kind of alluding to, people buy these cars, because they do want to be clean and green and do the right thing for the environment. Because I don’t think that there is hardly a soul in this country that doesn’t care about the environment. You know, you look at some of these environmental groups. The first one started were started by hunters, Ducks Unlimited, some of these big ones big environmentalist on both the left and the right and in the middle. So we all care about it. And unfortunately, Congress and regulators have been playing games with our mind, it started with a really big with the whole corn thing, the cellulosic ethanol, and how that ended up being a big failure, it’s caused more harm to the environment well documented now, then it’s helped, we were told it was going to cut back on CO2. We’re going to put ethanol in the gas, know, when you look at it net net, like from what you’re referring to Matt, know, the ethanol in our gas makes things worse. And to top it off, small engines get destroyed by the ethanol in our gas including the older motorcycles. So there’s a study that just came out of Germany. And they had a look at the Tesla Model 3, because it’s touted as a zero emissions car. And they added it all up all of the production of the batteries, which is where most of this problem comes from the transportation of the raw material, a minor but etc, etc. And this study in Germany came out and showed that a Tesla Model three over its expected lifetime compared with a Mercedes Benz C220D. Yes, C220D means diesel. So the Tesla Model 3 electric car compared to the Mercedes diesel, in its 20% more carbon dioxide per kilometer, when you consider all in. Now, the other thing to consider here is the vehicle itself, the manufacturing of the vehicle, the diesel cars are going to last 300,000 miles and more if they rebuild the engines. Some of these electric vehicles just aren’t going to last. So that’s interesting. It was based on Germany and their mix of fuel supplies and things. But don’t just assume that because it’s electric car that somehow it’s clean, because much of the stuff is done in China. And 90% of all the plastic in the ocean comes from third world countries like China, it does not come from the United States at all. And when we’re talking about the manufacturing of these vehicles in the batteries, some of the worst cesspools in the world are in those countries because of us thinking that somehow we’re buying green vehicles.

Ken 12:20
We’re talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us every Wednesday 7:38. before we let you go, you know, Matt and I are both big fans of digital books. So is Amazon burning all our future books?

Craig 12:33
Or do you member of the media might not know about this, but the 1984 and the controversy with Amazon, people that had bought George Orwell’s 1984 had it deleted from their Kindles by Amazon on purpose. To do remember that little controversy? 

Matt 12:52
I actually never heard that. No.

Craig 12:54
Oh, yes. Yes. Well, apparently there is a licensing problem with the current copyright owner so Amazon just says, Okay, well, fine. They don’t own the book anyways. If you buy a book on Amazon Kindle, you don’t own it. And so they just deleted it off of everybody’s Kindle. It was just absolutely amazing. They ended up settling it and they restored your book. But you know, they own nearly 50% of the physical marketplace of books now. Over 80% of the ebook sales in the US. And they have started purging books. And what they’re doing now is they used to say, yeah, Bezos we’re going to wait open market, we want discussions, we want people talking about everything, and will carry anything. Now they’ve started targeting white nationalist books, but they won’t get rid of other books. It’s amazing. They banned some of the anti Islam books, and they were refusing to take down some pedophilia books on first amendment grounds. So I’m starting to get a little upset here. Not that I like some of the speech here but I think.

Matt 14:03
No, I’m sorry No, I’m gonna be I’ll be the guy to say it I’ll be the insight you can and should be able to buy and read Mien Kampf if you want to. This is America.

Craig 14:10 
I agree.

Matt 14:11 
You know, you can either keep them all up or start selectively banning everything. I mean, it’s.

Craig 14:15
It’s important. It’s really important. You’ve got to have a discussion, right? That’s the problem with political correctness. They just try and cut you off because they disagree with you.

Matt 14:24
But I mean, you’re you’re also trying to legislate didn’t tend to like what if I bought Mien Kampf that I can start highlighting phrases that I found it really offensive for a book report I’m doing. I mean, like, you can’t just print the books. And let me come on. 

Ken 14:39
That’s what Noam Chomsky said.

Matt 14:40
Noam Chomsky has burned.

Ken 14:41  
Noam Chomsky.

Craig 14:44  
But the good news is burning digital books, when you burn the bits, it doesn’t actually cause any CO2 emissions. So yeah, it’s a green thing he’s doing that’s probably it.

Ken 14:56
Alright, Craig Peterson tech guru. Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk to you next week.

Craig 15:00
Take care guys. Bye bye.

Matt 15:02 
Thank you Craig Peterson. Alright, so we’re going to take a quick break.